Can I use a GPX file with GPSLarp?
You have a .gpx file — a route you recorded,
or downloaded, or were sent — and you want the phone to follow it.
Mostly no. There is no GPX import: no file picker, no open command, no way to hand GPSLarp a route file and have it played. One narrow thing does exist, it happens once, and it takes a single point out of each file.
01There is no GPX import
If that is what you came for, it is worth saying without decoration: the feature is not there. Nothing in the app opens a file you choose, nothing reads a track and plays it back, and there is no menu item that would.
This page exists because the question is asked constantly and the answer is usually implied rather than given. Sections 02 and 03 describe the one exception precisely, so that you can tell whether it is any use to you. Section 04 is what to do instead, and for most people that is the section that matters.
02The one thing that does exist
The very first time GPSLarp runs — before it has written a saved-locations
file of its own — it looks for a folder called
Fun-GPX-Locations inside your Downloads folder. If
it finds one, it reads every .gpx file in it.
From each file it takes the first waypoint, and nothing else
— the first <wpt> element in the document — and turns it
into one saved place, named after the file. Tracks and routes inside the file
are ignored entirely.
03Three things that follow
All three are counter-intuitive, and each one has sent somebody looking for a bug that is not there.
- It happens once, on first run only. As soon as the app has its own list of saved places, it stops looking. Adding files to that folder afterwards does nothing at all, no matter how many times you restart the app.
- A route contributes one point, not a path. A file describing a fifteen-kilometre walk becomes a single saved place at whichever waypoint happens to be first. The rest of the file is not read.
- A file it cannot read is skipped in silence. There is no error, no warning and no report listing what was imported. If a place you expected is missing from your list, that — rather than anything you did — is the reason.
04What to do instead
01If you have a route
Plan it in the app. Give it a start and an end and it builds a walking or driving route from real streets between the two, which is closer to what a route file was going to give you anyway — and it is a path rather than a point. See walking and driving a route.
02If you have a set of places
Add them by clicking the map or by searching for each one, and they go into your own saved list, which is the list the app actually uses. See setting an exact location and saved locations.
For a handful of places this is faster than assembling a folder of GPX files would have been, and unlike the first-run folder it keeps working forever.
05Why the format shows up at all
GPSLarp does write a GPX file, which is why the format turns up in conversations about it. When you plan a walk or a drive, the app builds one from the route it computed and hands that to the phone — it is how a moving position is expressed to iOS.
That file is generated, not supplied. It is written by the app, from a route the app planned, and there is no point in that chain where a file of yours could be substituted for it.
06What this page cannot tell you
Everything above is about what the software does with a file on your Mac, which is checkable and is where this page's confidence ends. It does not say that a planned route then plays correctly on your phone: nobody in this project has watched a location change happen on a real phone from end to end, and nobody has measured whether one stays put once set.
If a GPX import matters to you, the honest position is that it does not exist rather than that it is coming. Nothing on this page should be read as a plan.